12 Years A Slave: Review

Lupita Nyong'o and Chiwetel Ejiofor, featured in 12 Years a Slave

Before getting to the review, I wanted to let you know about a blog I just discovered. The publisher and editor is Kimberly N. Foster. Here's the link: http://www.forharriet.com/

And speaking of Harriet Tubman and the call to end slavery, I also wanted to offer a review of the film and winner of the latest Academy Award for Best Picture, 12 Years a Slave.

This is the cinematic telling of one U.S. man's true story. Solomon Northup was a real person who was born a free man in the north in 1808. He authored the book, 12 Years a Slave, about his capture in 1841 and release in 1853 from a white Southern hell.

What I appreciated was how the opening scenes might allow a white male viewer to see a Black man in 19th century U.S. as a free man, and how his horror at becoming a slave is not told through his abduction from West Africa, which might allow white people in the U.S. to distance ourselves from his plight. Northup, played superbly by Chiwetel Ejiofor, is "us" more than Kunta Kinte is "us". And for the purposes of a film most appropriately aimed at a white audience, this is crucial. Usually this is done by having the protagonist be white, reinforcing the deadly "Great White Man" myth, in such as in films like 1997's Amistad, 2006's Amazing Grace, and 2012's Lincoln.

I'm not saying the film is made (only) for a white U.S. audience: I'm saying that white people need to see and understand what this film is saying about us. And I'm not saying there isn't a collection of Great or Good White Men in this film. Brad Pitt's character, Bass, is one.

To me, the film brilliantly layers insult over injury, over and over. Each scene is another stark example of how whites conspire, on the institutional level and the interpersonal one, to control the bodies and destroy the dignity of Black people, here in the mid-19th century U.S. south. Each scene details the efforts of those enslaved to survive and not allow their humanity to be completely obliterated under the harsh and horrible lash of antebellum slavery.

The movie is brutal, graphically brutal, horrifyingly brutal, and unflinchingly honest in its depiction and portrayal of white men's sadism and savagery against Black people. In particular, it also depicts the complex relationship between white women and Black women, each group owned by white men. This is shown in the character of Mistress Shaw, played by Alfre Woodard.

But far more graphically, it is rendered through the tortured and tenacious humanity of Patsey, astoundingly acted by Lupita Nyong'o, who won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

A brilliant discussion of the legacy of colonial racist misogyny woven into the relationships of U.S. Black and white women may be read here in a brilliant piece by Michaela Angela Davis titled "12 Years A Slave: Rage, Privilege, Black Women and White Women". Here's the link, followed by an excerpt:

http://jezebel.com/12-years-a-slave-rage-privilege-black-women-and-whit-1452173238

The women in the beautifully brutal film 12 Years A Slave were mangled and maliciously intertwined. The enslaved women lived like beasts and the “free” women behaved like savages, trapped together in a filthy cage of rape, rage and bitter resentment. A resentment so magnificent, it could freshly fester in the psyche of their daughters for centuries to come.

The twisted relationship dynamics between the two lead female characters Patsey (Lupita Nyong’o) and Mistress Epps (Sarah Paulson) in 12 Years A Slave are a horror.

The juxtaposition of such naked racist-misogynist sadism with feeble gestures at Southern white gentility is striking to me, reminding me of how fused the two are, and how dependent they are on one another. The white man who is only brutal is uncouth and risks revealing the putrid soul of whiteness to everyone who want to believe it is natural or God-given. The white man who is only genteel is not doing his job. His job is to rule over, exploit, and dehumanise Black people: to treat Black men as worse than non-human plantation chattel; to treat Black women as chattel and also as a rape object: chattel slave and sexual slave both.

We see how white men, more stupid and less stupid ones, are seduced by an unjust and inhumane ability to rule others. We see the gross arrogance, the supremacist self-delusion that he might be better because he is free, even while he is doomed to moral inferiority due to how he treats other human beings.

As you watch the film, or rewatch it, note how each scene carefully reveals another bloody-sharp facet of what U.S. slavery did to people: the rulers and the ruled, the owners and the owned.

I am led to see more deeply how this is still the case, with more slavery than ever, and at least as much denial that it ought to be abolished once and for all.

Warren Jeffs and the US Military: same values--all of 'em WHM Supremacist

photo of serial rapist Warren Jeffs is from here

How it is that het men aren't stigmatised as child-rapists is beyond me. How it is that the US military can be seen as anything resembling "good" is also beyond me.

I am hearing about how the US military is suffering no economic downturn, doesn't know from recession, and will be profiting mightily--in every way--due to a very corrupt white male-led system of lack of checks and no balances.


The system was created by white het men and for white het men, well before white het manhood had cogealed into a globalised system of atrociously abusive power.

One white het man is allegedly "Christian". His name is Warren Jeffs. He represents some old-school white and male supremacist ideas about what girls and women are for. His view is that of  contemporary and past slave-holders: they exist for the Master, and he surely believes he's the master and, due only to his WHM supremacist location and privileges, is believed by man. Were he Black, Brown, Indigenous, Asian, Muslim, Jewish, gay, or a woman, he wouldn't have the positional/structural power he has had to rape and procure girls and women, including, especially, relatives of people he's already raped and procured.

Warren Jeffs is a slave-master. He controls minds and uses forms of force we're not likely to know too much about because when it comes to keeping control of other people, white het men do not like to brag about all the ways they do it, unless they can make it appear that girls and women are begging for such mistreatment and abuse.

I await his sentencing for committing crimes of sexual abuse, rape, and predation.

What Warren has against him is the fact that he's a single person, not a whole system of terrorism and corruption like the US military industrial complex. Because if he were a whole massive system, he'd be untouchable.

People will go hungry, people will die, people will become homeless, people will be raped, people and other sentient beings will be poisoned. This will be accomplished for great unstoppable profit by the US military. Its greediness for unchecked power, imbalanced control, Empire-bolstering domination, and various other manifestations of gynocidal, genocidal, and ecocidal destruction apparently knows no bounds and doesn't seek to encounter them.

US corporations and its military are the current slave-masters in a globalised economic world where might makes right and the weak are most of us.

President Eisenhower's caution to the future US, to curb the power of the military industrical complex, are unheeded. And he was no angel.

We've got the devil in charge and he isn't a US president: he's a force far beyond the power and control of presidency. We've been witnessing that during the weeks of ridiculous discussion about things like the debt ceiling. There's one way to bring the US into what many people might term "economic stability" (which would remain ecocidal, genocidal, and gynocidal), and that is to end our wars.

Ending het men's wars against girls and women ought to rise up as a central issue for human concern and social justice. Hopefully with Warren Jeffs behind bars, at least one predator/perpetrator will not be able to get his rapist hands on another female human being.

Hilarious video for Passover: "Let My People Go!"

This is one of the most clever videos I've ever seen on YouTube. Enjoy. Happy Passover to all who celebrate the Jewish holiday.

And, I'm praying for liberation from tyrannical militarised regimes for all the people of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and the entire region of North Africa and the Middle East, including for my Palestinian sisters and brothers.

Earnestine "Amma" Smith's story told by her granddaughter, Dee Rees, in the 2008 film Eventual Salvation

Before the feature length film, Pariah, was made, Dee Rees made a very moving film about her grandmother, Earnestine "Amma" Smith. I am happy to promote it through this post.

A Sundance Channel Original Documentary : EVENTUAL SALVATION

October 16th, 2009 by Sundance Channel

 

Founded in 1847 as a home for former African-American slaves, the West African nation of Liberia has welcomed generations of expatriate Americans fleeing racism. One such immigrant was Earnestine “Amma” Smith, who settled in the capital, Monrovia, in 1958. An educator and landowner, Amma fled her new home during the recent deadly civil wars. Smith’s granddaughter, documentary filmmaker Dee Rees, accompanies Amma on her return to a new Liberia, now governed by Africa’s first woman president, as she attempts to rebuild her life.

On International Holocaust Remembrance Day: This Jew asks, "What other genocides and mass atrocities are remembered and acknowledged in this way?"

photograph displaying grotesque anti-Semitic atrocity in a Nazi Death Camp pit is from here.

The gruesome photograph is cropped. I'm using the cropped version only because it allows for a visual reminder of what mass-death looks like, without the ability to focus in on the expressions on the faces or personal details of the bodies of those who perished. Generally, I won't put images of deceased people on this blog. We must note from the start, here, that only some humans will ever be regarded as human enough to support an international mourning of their loss.

At one website where the uncropped image exists, *here*, a commenter makes the following statement, referring to the importance of not forgetting the Nazi Holocaust and specifically addressing the matter of not forgetting who Adolph Hitler was and what he accomplished as a cultural-political leader in Germany in the 1930s and across half of the 1940s:

The man was a monster, supported by other monsters, and worshipped by millions. Sad to think he only gets less than a page in the new history books. Once he is forgotten we are doomed to repeat the horrors again.

A monster with other monsters: no. Monstrosity: yes. On the matter of repeated horrors, see all that follows. At the bottom of this post is copied text about "International Holocaust Remembrance Day", which occurred just yesterday. At the bottom of that piece, are links to related materials. It is the article to which the last link leads that I'll be addressing here, in an open letter to its authors.

I'm never sure what the function of such remembrance days is, other than to acknowledge those killed by and who survive genocidal atrocity with some level of collective respect and reverence. The perishing of approximately a dozen million people (some estimate the number of millions to be higher) across the span of five or so years, accomplished not by disease or famine (neither of which is apolitical), is something that ought not be forgotten and any and all social forces and dynamics that made such a heinous event happen ought be studied and not forgotten, in the service of preventing other similar atrocities. I am fully supportive of making time to remember those lost to political atrocity. The question immediately rises, though: whose political atrocities count, both as politically motivated crimes against humanity, and as genocides? And, why only a day of remembrance? Why not, in addition to that, an every-day accounting of our on-going atrocities?

What follows next is an article from Politico.com, and you may link back to it by clicking on the title. My commentary to the authors is in brackets and in bold.

Marking liberation from Auschwitz

A political march regarding the state television chief in Ivory Coast coast turned violent in 2010. | AP Photo Close

By MICHAEL ABRAMOWITZ & MARK HANIS | 1/27/11 3:57 AM EST

Today marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. The United Nations designated this date International Holocaust Remembrance Day to honor the memory of those killed during the [Nazi] Holocaust and to rededicate ourselves to doing all we can to prevent such horrible crimes from happening again.  

[Michael and Mark, I hope you are aware of the horrible crimes that have happened in North America in the period of time inclusive of and since the anti-Semitic and otherwise anti-human Nazi atrocities during WWII occurred. 

I hope you know, for example, that forced sterilisation of many ethnic groups of women, and the boarding and brutalising, including sexually, of First Nations and American Indian children was common practice through the 1960s. Human rights has yet to be realised in the Great Nation of the United States, which is responsible for millions of deaths globally, since the 1960s. Genocide against Indigenous Peoples cross-continentally, and in North America specifically, is on-going, is never-ending, and isn't so much a matter of what those of us who are white and Jewish ought "never forget" as it is a matter we ought to finally recognise as happening. In order to never forget something it must first be acknowledged, and not denied even as it occurs. This is, most certainly, the case with genocide of Indigenous people on this continent, and to Indigenous people globally perpetrated by our government policies and corporate heads wreaking havoc on the Earth which includes the sacred ground and homelands of so many nations of Native people. 

We still have an annual holiday, a whole day set aside for remembrance, during which we are encouraged to celebrate and honor a man who was a European invader, a serial rapist, a trafficker of girls, and a racist mass murderer. I'm sure you know his name: Christopher Columbus. I have written about this rapist savage, *here*. The piece was originally titled "A broch tzu Columbus: a curse on Columbus." 

As a Jew, I find it beyond comprehension and any claim to national morality that the U.S. has been celebrating this monstrous terrorist's life and horrific "accomplishments" for over one hundred years. We also take four days per year towards the end of November to celebrate the beginning of what remains the feast which symbolises the start of the largest genocide, in terms of gross numbers of those barbarically massacred, that the world has ever known. (Estimates range from 70 to 90 million people destroyed, which includes scores of nations and hundreds of cultures and ethnic groups. Here. Not over there.

What do you make of a popular information website promoting an idea that As many or more Europeans were killed by American Indians were American Indians killed by European men? See *here* for more. What would your own response be to an established Wikipedia page promoting the idea that as many Nazis were killed by Jews as Jews killed by Nazis, across the 1930s and through the mid-1940s? In what sense is such a webpage not outrageously propagandistic and horrendously racist? Where is our outrage?)

What do you feel about the fact that there are, presently, race-specific atrocities completely denied by white people who benefit from it in the U.S.: against the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, and also against Black and Brown people. What do you make of this act of omission by whites who control or have the most access to our media?]

Given the bloody history of the past five decades — in Cambodia, Rwanda, the Balkans, Darfur and other places [I'm wondering why you limit the global scope to part of Southeast Asia, two regions of sub-Saharan Africa, and part of Europe: what is the function of ignoring the genocide happening in North America? I'd argue it is ignored because white men and their media in the U.S. do not believe they are in any way responsible the genocides you do list; this assumption is terribly, horribly false: U.S. and European white men are implicated quite directly in each and every one of them]— a healthy degree of skepticism is warranted about politicians’ commitment to the lofty goal of “never again.” [Especially when current genocides against many Indigenous Nations, against many ethnic groups--each happening in the U.S.--will not even be referenced, discussed, footnoted, or alluded to in a piece like yours. Nor will such atrocities be given a day during which we pledge to remember to stop committing them.] However, we believe that progress is discernible. Efforts by the United Nations and among member states to make genocide prevention a priority, coupled with a new focus by government officials and civil society [Given that the majority of those states are responsible for perpetrating genocide presently, committing other racist atrocity, and maintaining massive systematic crimes against women and girls to this day and well into tomorrow, what is your definition of "civil"?] on keeping political crises from metastasizing into massive violence against civilians, offer hope that a world without genocide is attainable. [Who are "civilians"? Are African Americans "civilians"? Are Mexicans and Mexican-Amricans? Are American Indians? Are women and girls across ethnicity and race? What are "political crises" and what constitutes "massive violence"? Men's rape of women and girls? Men's battery and sexual assault of women and children? Men's trafficking and sexual slavery of women and girls? I would appreciate an answer to this and any other questions posed to you here.]

Nearly 17 years ago, the United Nations looked the other way as genocide unfolded in Rwanda. So it was more than a little noteworthy last week when two senior U.N. officials, charged with monitoring for the threat of such grave crimes, bluntly warned about “the possibility of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing” in the Ivory Coast. [And also between the Atlantic Coast and the Pacific Coast of the United States, no? Again, my charge is that you are focusing on the possibility of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, ethnic cleansing programs, and other mass atrocities over there so as to avoid discussing those happening right here. What is the social function of rendering completely invisible the numerous and horrifying mass atrocities against women--white and of color? And against Black and Brown men and women living in the U.S.? Is the maintenance of a system of poverty inside and outside the U.S. a crime against humanity and form of ethnic cleansing, as far as you are concerned? Is what is happening to American Indians now cultural, spiritual, and physical genocide or isn't it?]

The Security Council has reinforced the U.N. peacekeeping force in the country, and numerous governments in Africa and elsewhere [in the U.S.?] are pressing Laurent Gbagbo to step down after the internationally recognized victory of opposition leader Alassane Ouattara in November’s election.

In Sudan, a referendum likely to result in partition of the country later this year proceeded relatively peacefully, following an intense diplomatic push by the United States and other countries. [This is the first time in this article you mention the actions of the United States. It is when the U.S. promotes ending atrocity, not when the U.S. government and its military and adult white male citizenry perpetrate it. Do you get the political function of these selective offerings of what the U.S. does?] Only six months ago, there were serious questions about whether the referendum would occur on time, and many feared a return to the sweeping violence, even genocide, that has plagued Africa’s largest country since its independence in 1956. [1956. That would be the year the following occurred in the U.S. Civil Rights struggle (source: *here*):

University of Alabama admits Autherine Lucy as its first African-American student, February 3, after prolonged litigation in federal court. White students and Tuscaloosa residents riot on February 6, and Lucy is suspended, allegedly for her own safety; she is later expelled for criticizing the university.

Special session of the Virginia legislature in August adopts program of "massive resistance" to school desegregation that calls for the closing of schools under desegregation orders.

Governor Frank Clement orders the National Guard to restore order in Clinton, Tennessee, on September 2 after white mobs attempt to block the desegregation of the high school.

Eisenhower is reelected on November 6.

Supreme Court affirms ruling of lower federal court in Browder v. Gayle declaring segregation on Alabama intrastate buses to be unconstitutional, November 13.

Montgomery boycott ends on December 21 as municipal buses begin operating on a desegregated basis. (Read Ted Poston in The New York Post, June 19, 1956 reporting on the boycott.)

1956 would also be the year in the U.S. marking state recognition (by North Carolina) of an Indigenous Nation, the Lumbee. Federal recognition has yet to occur. From *here*:

The Lumbee are the present-day descendants of the Cheraw Tribe and have continuously existed in and around Robeson County since the early part of the eighteenth century. (Note: A brief timeline of Lumbee history can be found by clicking here.) In 1885, the tribe was recognized as Indian by the State of North Carolina. The tribe has sought full federal recognition from the United States Government since 1888. In 1956, Congress passed the Lumbee Act, which recognized the tribe as Indian. However, the Act withheld the full benefits of federal recognition from the tribe. Efforts are currently underway to pass federal legislation that grants full recognition to the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina.

It was also a year of U.S. atrocity against Vietnamese people in the "United States War", called "The Vietnam War" by U.S.ers, so as not to so directly implicate and name U.S. Americans as the genocidal mass murders, based on their national/ethnic identity.

It was also a year in which there was a massive campaign to domesticate women in middle class and suburban homes. Poorer women, usually Black, were already being exploited for labor in other ways, including by being economically forced to clean whites' homes and care for whites' children, leaving their own children at home.]

Severe dangers remain in both the Ivory Coast and Sudan [and in the U.S.?]— particularly in the long-troubled Darfur region, [what about the long-troubled regions where the Navajo and Dakota live?] where violence has surged in recent months. However, there is reason to hope that governments around the world are finally getting the message that investing to prevent mass atrocities is not only sound humanitarian policy but also far more cost effective — avoiding huge costs of handling refugees, reconstruction and other requirements that inevitably follow genocide. Genocidal states also are invariably failed states, which incubate terrorism, pandemic diseases and other scourges. [This appears to me to be about as morally bankrupt an argument for stopping genocide as I can imagine: because of what it might cost the perpetrators? Because it might incite violence or spread disease which will impact and infect the killers and their accomplices? Is that the moral/ethical point you are wanting to promote?]

Just last year, the United Nations reaffirmed its commitment to a “Responsibility to Protect,” making clear that its members are willing to step in to protect civilians from genocide, ethnic cleansing and other atrocities [such as trafficking and rape?] when countries are unwilling or unable to do so. New U.N. offices on RtoP and Genocide Prevention are working to shine a light on situations where these crimes are occurring or likely to occur. [Will any light be shone on the genocide in the U.S.? Will any ray reach the plight of women and girls surviving--or not--men's abuses them as women and as girls? Are female people across age capable of being recognized as a politically harmed group of citizens, in your opinion?]

The Obama administration has appointed, for the first time, a White House director of war crimes and atrocities at the National Security Council and established an interagency prevention committee to address potential threats of genocide and mass atrocities. [What does it mean, to you, that this is occurring "for the first time"? Is it because the U.S. has not understood the Maafa and slavery and segregation of African and African-descended people as a crime and atrocity--specifically: a genocidal one? Were not the lives of millions of West Africans lost in the trans-Atlantic journey into hell-on-Earth, and on sea? Were human beings not laid down in shackles due to their race? What definitional dimension of "genocide" is missing? 

Do we not mention what happened and continues to happen to Black people in the U.S. "genocide" because the U.S. government and the military and police forces collectively imprison Black and Brown people as a means of ethnic cleansing? Do we avoid discussing anything we do as "terrorism" and "an atrocity" because the U.S. not-so-covertly requires and presently maintains mass atrocities including terroristic assaults against women and girls, nationally and internationally; mass atrocities and terroristic assaults against poor people and people of color, regionally and globally? Do we avoid "the g word" for what the U.S. has always done because the actual, current crimes against American Indians and other Indigenous people are not at all a "potential threat" but are, rather, a present and very active form of genocide? Is it because we don't do "reparations" for people we are still genocidally killing? Do we wait to see whose left, hoping there will be few to no people to pay? How do you compare the stunning silence by white U.S. citizens, civil people, who rather defiantly refuse to acknowledge or regard an on-going genocide, as compared to the silence and inaction of "the good Germans"? Are all of these reasons why we cannot categorise over 500 years of white men's brutality against Black people as genocidal, if for 200 to 300 of those years white men who settled in what became the U.S. were among the slavers?]

Congress also has taken some tentative steps toward endorsing genocide prevention as a matter of policy. [What is your opinion on why these steps are tentative? And isn't it shameful that the U.S. is only considering doing any of this now (tentatively)?] On the last day of its recent session, the Senate passed a resolution that recognizes the U.S. national interest in “helping to prevent and mitigate acts of genocide and other mass atrocities against civilians and supporting and encouraging efforts to develop a whole government approach to prevent and mitigate such acts.” [Can you link me to the U.S. government's plans to prevent and mitigate rape, battery, pimping, trafficking, racist abuses by police forces, the blatantly illegal and forced imprisonment of Black, Brown, and Muslim people of any ethnicity, genocidal activities maintained by the U.S. government and U.S.-based corporations corruptly feigning residency abroad?]

As important as these steps taken by Washington is the continued growth of a vibrant and vocal constituency of citizens and nongovernmental organizations committed to the abolition of genocide and other mass atrocities. Governments everywhere are on notice that they risk public opprobrium and embarrassment if they fail to respond effectively to the kind of killing that took place in Rwanda or Darfur. [This capacity to feel such embarrassment--or regret, remorse, or shame, to move out of denial, to release this country's citizens from governmental and media-imposed delusions of grandeur--appears to me to exist beyond or outside the clinically sociopathic consciousness of those who rule in the U.S. Do you agree?]

Despite these gains, considerable work remains. [Let's start by recognising the genocide against Indigenous North Americans and against all women and girls. And by removing from our national calendar the shameful, disgraceful holidays of Columbus Day and Thanksgiving.] Much of this agenda was laid out in the December 2008 report by the Genocide Prevention Task Force, co-chaired by Madeleine Albright and William Cohen. The report recommends an array of measures aimed at strengthening government capacity to prevent mass atrocities. [Might it be prudent to start with a "Genocide Acknowledgment and Recognition Task Force"?]

Some of the recommendations have been adopted, but many have not — including a strong presidential statement of policy on preventing genocide, the creation of an international atrocities prevention network and greater funding for crisis prevention in countries at risk. [Such as for white men's terrorist activities uniquely targeting women and girls across ethnicity, and for terrorist activities against Black, Brown, Muslim, and Indigenous people across the U.S., and across the rest of the Americas? If what the U.S. military is doing in Afghanistan and Iraq and in other parts of Asia isn't terrorism, pray tell, what is it? Shall we consider our support of a white supremacist Israeli Apartheid state, displacing, relocating, policing, militarily brutalising, and mass murdering Palestinians, while also discriminating against people of color within Israel--Jews and non-Jews--to be "civil" and humane?]

This must be accompanied by continued efforts to build a permanent anti-genocide constituency around the world that will hold all governments [including the U.S.'s? Are human rights activists, including feminists, right to assume that "all" would include the U.S. government?] accountable for turning “never again” into a reality. This task requires organization and massive public education about the moral, financial and national security costs of genocide. [How about the cost in human life, in grief, in suffering, in will to resist, to those groups the U.S. government, its corporations, and militarily protected institutions systematically violate, exploit, dominate, and destroy? Would you agree that considering them in any assessment of cost would be moral, appropriate, and responsible?]

Achieving this goal would be a worthy accomplishment to celebrate on another International Holocaust Remembrance Day. [When kosher pigs fly.]

Michael Abramowitz is director of the Committee on Conscience, the genocide prevention initiative of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Mark Hanis is co-founder and president of the newly merged Genocide Intervention Network / Save Darfur Coalition. 

And finally, this. Please click on the title to link back.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

January 27 marks the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. In 2005, the United Nations General Assembly designated this day as International Holocaust Remembrance Day (IHRD), an annual day of commemoration to honor the victims of the Nazi era. Every member nation of the U.N. has an obligation to honor the memory of Holocaust victims and develop educational programs as part of an international resolve to help prevent future acts of genocide. The U.N. resolution that created IHRD rejects denial of the Holocaust, and condemns discrimination and violence based on religion or ethnicity.

To commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27, 2011, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will host a candle-lighting ceremony attended by the Washington, D.C. diplomatic community, Holocaust survivors, and the general public. The ceremony will take place in the Museum's Hall of Remembrance.

Read or watch President Barack Obama’s remarks commemorating International Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2010, which acknowledges the work of Sara Bloomfield and the Museum in preserving the memory of the Holocaust.

In addition, each April or May the United States officially commemorates the Holocaust during the national Days of Remembrance. The Museum is mandated by the U.S. Congress to lead the nation in commemorating this day.

Visit http://www.ushmm.org/remembrance/dor/ for more information and resources.

Watch a CBS public service announcement about International Holocaust Remembrance Day, featuring Katie Couric and the Museum.

Read an International Holocaust Remembrance Day Op-ed on preventing genocide today.

"A Political Hierarchy in Gender Binary Drag", or When is a binary not a binary? When we're talking about a gendered, raced, sexed, classed HIERARCHY

this graphic is from here at veganarchist.com

NOTE: revised and added to on 25 Jan. 2011 ECD. (See the third and fourth paragraph from the end of the post going up, not from the beginning of the post. I write there about gender dysphoria a bit.)

For me, this is THE critical question that is responsible for two distinct realities in the white het male dominated West:

--radical feminism as presented by some cisgender women--including the work of radical white women and radical women of color, and

--cis queer politics including the description of trans identities as presented by some transsexual people, but not by many trans- and inter-gender people.

I have yet to hear what's radical about the contemporary liberal queer/transsexual understanding of gender. Can someone please tell me who benefits from rendering "gender" apolitical? Since when is political oppression only "social options"?

For me, first of all, we have the same phenomenon, albeit from a white class-privileged location socially. I never felt "like a boy" as boys around me most often behaved; I rejected a lot of what 'being a man' had to offer me, while of course soaking up a lot of privileges--they come with the location, I realised, not the identity. Men like John Stoltenberg and Robert Jensen seem to make a case for rejecting manhood on the interpersonal/behavioral level, which I think denies the harshest truth--womanhood and manhood are not embedded primarily in our identities; they are embedded in systems, institutions, structures, locations, positions. None of which go anywhere if we shift our individual identities.

This is my view: racist patriarchy can do very well, thank you, with queer folks in it, with trans folks in it, because it's not the binary it most needs to hold onto; it's male supremacy. And male supremacy thrives in queer/trans community. As does misogyny.

The trick--and I do feel it's a nasty trick--of uber-WHM supremacist academy's post-modernist and post-structural perspectives (we can note the view that there's some sense of getting beyond structural reality in the very term), is that the "problem" is "the gender binary" always worded exactly that way. The irony of post-structuralism being used to maintain oppressive structures seems lost on many in the Academy. PoMo is Mo in PoMo clothing.

"The gender binary". The gender binary? Gender has been many things across cultures, but it being a "binary" isn't really the issue. In patriarchal societies, especially white ones and white-colonised ones, gender is a socially enforced hierarchy--regardless of how many there are. That is the issue. So if we don't deflect from the "hierarchy" by calling it a "binary", we end up having to directly face a very misogynistic system that can find places for male women and female men; for any permutation and combination of femininity and masculinity, as long as feminine always means "less than" masculine, and masculine always means "power over" the feminine.

"Cowboys and Indians" isn't a binary. Nor is Nazi/Jew. Nor is Black/white. Nor, in my view, is man/woman. Those are hierarchies--in the first case a game white children played around me as if it were a binary--that's the trick: to make it appear to be "us vs. them" as if there's some sort of level playing field. As if the Indians could win one day; the cowboys the next. Meanwhile, the actual genocide of American Indians and the existence of cowboy culture across the mid and southwest is what? Not relevant? Not real? Interferes with the fun of the game? This is my issue with queer drag: to turn a condition requiring great violence into a fun time without noting that it is, to the core, violence--directed against women and girls--is to be terribly disrespectful to those who pay the highest price for 'behaving like women'.

When I bring this concern, this critique to pro-feminist queer folks, they say, "we just wanna have fun". That's privilege--to be able to have fun with the reprehensible terroristic destruction of a class of people. Shall we have a game of Nazi-Jew also? How about White Master-Black slave? Oh, wait: we do that too. Those are called "genres" in pornography, which people consume as pleasure.  They are also the role-play games some people act out for fun. To better understand what's oppressive about that, I recommend reading Audre Lorde's contribution to Against Sadomasochism. To reduce a sadist or a slaver to being "just a role I play" is to be utterly insensitive to those who are experiencing denigration, humiliation, and possession by very unfun sadists and slavers.

To turn a hierarchy into a binary is a pretty fiendish thing to do, if one's people are being destroyed by the hierarchy in binary's clothing.

Social hierarchies are political systems of grossly cruel power exercised in every way through every method, to keep women and girls down relative to men and boys; to keep Black and Brown people down; to keep American Indians on the "endangered species list". It'd be like saying "hunter and lion" is a binary. Huh??

The white/het/cis/male supremacist hierarchy will keep trans folks out if they're seen as "a bunch of queers" (whether or not they are) because "queers" are seen as doing one of two things, neither of which is "difference" except in the most liberal sense. Society isn't threatened by difference, exactly, in this view. It is threatened by specific challenges to white supremacy and to het male supremacy--to the institutionalised ideologies and practices of each form of dominance and subordination. South Africa, for example, doesn't have a race binary, exactly. They have more than two categories of raced being. But guess which one is on top? Whiteness.

So it will be with any additional categories in a male supremacist system. It won't matter whether or not there are transmen, as long as cismen--cis HET men--are dominant. This is why, to me, "queer politics" is constructed to be liberal not radical, and largely anti-woman and anti-lesbian. From a dominant cultural standpoint, "lesbianism" rejects male supremacy by rejecting one of its key mandates: that all girls and women be sexually or otherwise physically and intimately involved with boys and men. To not do this is always seen by men-in-power as a big ol' fuck you to men. As if woman-loving couldn't possibly be anything else. It's all about the boyz. All the time. But, nonetheless, "d*kes" are beaten up for not being willing and welcoming of men's sexuality, which is to say men's invasions and violations of women and girls.

Gay males are rejected, ostracised, beaten, and occasionally killed by het men predominantly because, in the words of John Stoltenberg, they are seen to participate in the degraded status of the female. Bottom line: gay males are seen as men who suck dick and are fucked by dick. So whether lesbian or gay, these "orientations" are seen to threaten het male supremacy's codes of conduct: all dicks must be weapons used against women not men; and all women must be available for men's dick-tutorial target practice.

How, then, did we collectively arrive at a theory of "difference" (or of a conception and articulation of gender as a binary) when there's such glaring "dominance" and a well-protected (and generally invisibilised or naturalised) hierarchy? C. A. MacKinnon writes about this in detail--the very serious dangers to women of turning "dominance" into "difference" but specifically in terms of how the law recognises--or doesn't--that women aren't the same as men and also aren't just "different" from men. There are very real, dire consequences for women globally, and for anyone and everything else white het men dominate (including animals and the Earth) if male supremacy isn't even named when we discuss and challenge "gender".

My question, really for all of us who are trans- and inter-gender, is this: "what does it mean, materially, spiritually, socially, to say "we don't feel like [a specific sex]": who told us what "being female" or "being male" is supposed to feel like, be experienced as, or be socially made into? And, to the extent we don't identify with or feel at home in our bodies, can we at least respectfully discuss the many reasons why that occurs without politically privileging those that appear to re-biologise "sex"? How does "I don't feel like a female" compare to "I don't feel like a woman and didn't feel like a girl"? And how does a social program of genderqueer people demanding to be considered "men" and "women" by society and the State interrupt or challenge a "gender binary", anyway? How does sexual trauma in childhood effect our own "at-homeness" in our bodies. I'm not making the case that "everyone who wants to surgically change their bodies from one sex to another" is a survivor of sexual assault.

I'm suggesting that there are many reasons why we don't feel comfortable in our own skin, why we are repulsed by our bodies, why we feel alien inside them, etc. And these many reasons should be discussed online so that someone else who comes along and feels alien inside their skin can have many ways to understand this, and not just have a few people referring them to a doctor who has their own interests to sell a way of understanding "gender dysphoria". Gender dysphoria needs to be unpacked, as well as regarded as real.

Why are so many white class-privileged queer-defined people unwilling to engage on these rather critical subjects while being willing to write about "the gender binary"? More queer lives are impacted by male dominance than by "a binary called sex". Most queer people's and most women's lives are greatly impacted by many forms of male supremacist values and practices than by "the binary problem". Most of our lives, worldwide are shaped horrifically by poverty, rape, trafficking, famine, HIV, corporate/class warfare and globalisation, racism and genocide, nuclear and other toxic/lethal waste, and the social degradation of female human beings globally. These are not "ideas" that must be engaged: they are hard-core realities that must be challenged and ended.

Discussing "the gender binary" is a politically mistaken and socially irresponsible way to refer to "what's wrong with gender", which is that men are killing, maiming, and otherwise harming women and girls. All over the planet. To invisibilise a political hierarchy called "gender" is part of the work of pro-patriarchs, who pretend cisgender women are the most powerful people on Earth. Why are queer folks doing that work for heteropatriarchal cis men? They really do know how to do it by themselves (well, with women raising them, feeding them, tending to them, and otherwise nurturing them throughout their lifetimes). If we're to end male dominance and male violence, wouldn't it make sense for all of us who are not cis het men, and a few who are, to join together in the struggle to challenge and dismantle patriarchal oppression?

Toward a Revolutionary Radical Queer Agenda

photo still of Honey, in the film Born in Flames, is from here

Revised on 15 January 2013.

Foreword to the post that follows:
This blog has historically done two things primarily: called out Western white het men's (WHM's) misogyny, racism, and heterosexism, and promoted the activist efforts of radical women of color, Indigenous women, and radical lesbian feminists (groups which are not mutually exclusive). I began to get criticism about my focus on, for example, heterosexual pornography--why would I not discuss gay pornography too? This is one response to that critique:
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2008/10/white-gay-men-marriage-and-prostitution.html

Over the two and a half years this blog has existed, I've increasingly realised how much of a waste of time and energy it is to try and get the most privileged people in society to be accountable to the atrocities they protect and defend as their "rights". I engage very seldom with WHM at this point. As I see it, there's little to no reason to do so: they don't care to listen, to engage, to be respectful, or to even acknowledge the depth and breadth of their power, privileges, and entitlements. If there are white het men who are radically anti-CRAP, let them take up the challenge to confront their brothers. It's not the job of queer and trans folks, women, and people of color (again, significantly overlapping populations), to educate straight folks, men, and whites, respectively.

In the last month or so, especially, I have begun a systematic examination and critique of dominant Western queer culture. Some of this critique has happened in conversation with Theory-Q at the blog Below The Belt. I have been in a process of coming out as intergender, and feel it is the obligation of those of us in trans/intergender circles to call one another out when misogyny, racism, and classism is present in our communities and conversations.

I tend to generate posts based on the issues which are before me and which make clear the relative positions of power various social groups have; it has never been the contention of this blog that anti-feminist, anti-radical transgender women occupy a more oppressive location over and against radical lesbian feminists than do dominant pro-CRAP cisgender men, for example. Nor is my belief that white M2F trans people are oppressed by cis women of color, or by cisgender lesbians, feminist or not. We can and unfortunately do hurt and alienate one another. Because we often share community spaces, we are terribly vulnerable to one another's insensitivity and ignorance. But some of us are also politically threatening, structurally oppressive, and historically and presently murderous in our endeavors. I contend that those most targeted for destruction are people of color--trans and not trans, and females--cis, trans, and intersex. In my lived experience, and based on everything I have learned about the history of humanity, those most politically threatening, structurally oppressive, and historically murderous are white and male.

I'll never have enough time to critique the barbaric and savage practices of WHM--they are endless and on-going with no sign of slowing down. But this blog will likely continue to focus most often on what WHM do that oppresses everyone else or, at least, to place oppressed people's many struggles in the context of seeing how WHM supremacist society shapes how and what we do to survive, and also, hopefully, sooner than later, achieve liberation by placing at the center of our analysis the experiences of girls and women globally, particularly those of color, those who are poor, and those who live in the Third and Fourth Worlds.

Please also see these related posts:
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/12/jumping-into-deep-end-of-gay-jean-pool.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2008/08/prison-and-closet-racism-and.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/11/radical-african-feminist-patricia.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/08/uses-of-erotic-erotic-as-power-classic.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/08/black-gay-men-and-white-het-male.html 
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-does-pro-sex-mean-and-what-can-one.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-is-gay-sex-pornography-tries-to.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/09/gay-literature-gay-pornography-gay-sex.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/12/trying-not-to-hit-below-belt-tricky.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/11/transsexuals-transgender-and-radical.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/11/anti-radical-anti-feminist-alliance.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/11/anti-radical-anti-feminism-in-pro.html
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/12/red-without-blue-since-when-did-lgbt.html

The rest of this post was revised on 2 Jan 2010 ECD. With great thanks to ll for all her support and critiques. Further revisions occurred on 15 January 2013.

We understand that Life is imperiled by the ways of the White Het Man, and as his ways are increasingly globalised, made foundational, made to seem functional, made to seem sane, made to seem necessary, made to seem good, moral, natural, and--especially--indispensable and inevitable. We recognise that these ways of being in the world and doing civilisation are structural and political while also cultural, social, and personal.

In societies dominated and ruled by the White Het Man, gender is not what it is in other societies which pre-exist and survive his savage and brutal invasions and occupations of us and our land.

In the societies of the WHM, we endure, resist, challenge, and seek to radically transform gender through the eradication of the institutions and interpersonal practices which bolster and protect it as a cornerstone in WHM society, along with race, region, and class hierarchies.

We ought not seek assimilation into WHM society as our goal, while we understand that some of us will sometimes acquiesce and accommodate for individual survival; also because the dominant society only gives us queer-hating, trans-hating, and woman-hating options for how to survive. But accommodation and acquiescence, assimilation and acceptance, and the defence and enabling of WHM values, systems, and institutions ought not be our collective aim. Radical transformation of WHM society is a process and goal worthy of our time and energy, wherever and whenever we have it to give.

We don't seek transgression of gender as performance; we work for the eradication of gender as power exercised over and against all who are not WHM. The kind of drag show performances white gay men enthusiastically promote as acceptable, which overtly mock and degrade non-trans girls and women as a specific class of gender-oppressed human beings, ought to be challenged not applauded. (These shows are also notoriously racist, classist, pro-prostitution, and pro-child molestation.)

Gender, for WHM, is a structural, political system of subordination, dominated by men, of all beings deemed "female" or "feminine", particularly and especially everyone named "girls" and "women" by men. In the West, the gender system is ruled by WHM, oppressing and stigmatising of all us who are not deemed white enough, heterosexual enough, or manly enough. For our collective survival, we ought not seek to become who they want us to be even while we find ourselves caught in ways of being they want us to learn, practice, and support. The path is never easy. We don't pretend it is.

For survival, we're better off creating safe and loving environments, systems of support-in-community in which to raise our youth; we required dignified care-in-community for our elderly. We don't pretend our ancestors don't exist or don't have spiritual relevance to our current lives. We respect and honor Earth-centered spiritual traditions but do not seek to exploit them, as so many middle-class whites do. We are, many of us, Indigenous. Those of us who are Indigenous have not disappeared. The many forms of exploitation and invisibilisation of our people by non-Native queer and trans people, and by non-Native heterosexuals, is not just problematically racist; it is pro-genocidal.

We seek to undermine and overthrow WHM supremacist systems and practices, and the authority and abuses which inhere in them, to take what is ours, including our land and Ways, and to bring justice and liberation to our people. We do this for the Earth and for all Life, with the assistance of the Earth and all Life. We join with the forests and seas to restore the Earth to a vibrant heavenly place of increasing diversity, not a death-adoring hellish purgatory adorned with pavement and pollution.

We recognise that dominant Religious, Economic, Educational, Medical, Psychiatric, Immigration, and Criminal-Justice practices and policies are historically and presently used against our people, to punish and quarantine us, to silence us and remove us from the population where the people in power live, to take reproductive choice from us, to take capability of feeling sexual pleasure from us, to produce in us a sense of shame and self-hatred, to render us invisible to the powerful and disdainful towards one another.

We understand that among English-speakers and readers, the term "surgery", for many of us without raced, ethnic, economic, educational, gendered, and regionalised power, is not positive; nor is it a desired medical intervention. The very mention of it triggers many of us. It has been used against our bodies in violating and disabling ways. Those who vocally promote surgery as unproblematically "positive" in dominant media are among the most privileged and powerful queer and non-queer people: they do not speak for all of us, while they are part of our community. We ask that those who are most privileged and powerful inside and outside queer community, be responsible to the ways that surgical interventions are used to terrorise and traumatise many of us who are trans, intergender, intersex, or not. We also demand it. This is not to say that non-dominant people do not find reduced levels of emotional and cognitive dissonance with the assistance of the dominant medical establishment; it is to say that this happens in contexts in which traditional Indigenist approaches have been systematically degraded and eliminated from our lives.

We do not consider the promotion of "shopping" for a vagina or breasts to be respectful of those of us who were labeled female at birth, raised as girls, and who are structurally located and socially mistreated as women. Some of us many choose to have surgical procedures that include modifying our genitals. We acknowledge that many who do seek out medical or surgical interventions to alleviate anxieties about gender identity are not transgender or transsexual; many cisgender men and women seek out these surgeries, for example. But the net result is one that promotes and protects, rather than undermines, WHM supremacist power.

There is no indication that liberal Western WHM supremacist societies cannot accommodate M2F and F2M people, as long as they accept the heteropatriarchal standards and practices enforced on everyone, trans or not. And as long as our people, particularly women and transsexual people of any gender, remain subordinate and subservient to those in power, especially sexually in systems of exploitation and rape.

Because most of us who are transgender and transsexual will never be able to afford or otherwise access such surgeries or medical interventions, we must respect the fact that most of us not only do not "pass" as "women" and "men", but many of us do not wish to, even while this decision does not keep us safe from threats and acts of violence and discrimination by non-trans people.

White M2F and F2M transsexual people are a minority population among all trans people; this is not something the dominant media will alert the masses to, because it would mean acknowledging that many of us do not accept or find any kind of emotional-psychic restorative home living inside the confines of a Western white patriarchal gender binary. Those of us who are intergender and transgender, for example, as well as many of us who are transsexual and intersex, are not interested in gender-specific surgeries to change our sexed bodies. Because of this decision to refuse surgical interventions, or simply to not choose them, we are never made visible on talk and chat shows. The general attitude among white liberal non-trans people is this: "I sure hope they can get that top and bottom surgery, so they can fully be a man or a woman". This is not only misogynistic and male supremacist; it is anti-lesbian, anti-intergender, and anti-transgender too. And it is racist and classist, promoting ways of being that are outside of traditional Indigenist and oppressed ethnic worldviews and values.

We understand that the problem with mass corporate media isn't simply that it represents us in stereotypical pro-gender binaried (heteropatriarchal and white male supremacist) ways, but that it doesn't represent or present most of us at all. We also understand that whether we are Black, Brown, Asian, Indigenous, or poor, homeless, trafficked, enslaved, or imprisoned, our experiences are not part of what the dominant society (and its media) imagines "who queer people are".

Access into racist, heterosexist, capitalist, and misogynistic institutions such as marriage and the military ought not be not our aim: why do some of us fight for the right to commit racist atrocities against citizens of the world who are targeted solely because they are Brown, Black, Latina/o, Asian, African, Indigenous and not white and North American, European, and Australian? Why do some of us fight for inclusion in an institution--marriage--that remains dangerous for most cis women, including especially economically disadvantaged women, immigrant women, and women who come from cultures that have other ways of creating intimate unions, families, and communities? Why would we support, in our conscientious activism, the systems and institutions that oppress and kill us, globally. We would we support, in our communities of choice, the ways of WHM that destroy people of color, the poor, women, and the Earth and its many expressions of Life?

While we acknowledge that we each must find our own ways through this life, we aim to honor and respect those without the power of those atop gender, race, class, and region hierarchies. We can demonstrate this respect by not appropriating the names and labels race- and gender-oppressed people cannot escape. We can choose to not call ourselves the names that cisgender girls and women have no choice but to negotiate and endure. We can affirm ourselves as transgender, transsexual, intergender, intersex, asexual, genderqueer and otherwise queer people, along with many names and identities that aren't white-centric, euro-centric, and Anglo-centric. We ought not be required by anyone to use only English terms, Western terms, and non-Indigenous terms to name ourselves.

We can, as gay males, reject the politics of affirming manhood in media and in society-at-large; we can affirm a politic that states and expresses unequivocally that there is nothing wrong with being unmasculine and unmanly; and, in fact, our collective survival depends on het men stopping their masculinist and manly ways. If gay males are ever to be respectful, trusted allies to girls and women's struggles for liberation globally, we must embrace a politic that doesn't promote oppressive manhood.

We must not forget that lesbians and queer women of any color, female or intersex, are oppressed not only for being lesbian and queer; they are oppressed for being female, girls, and women. And most non-heterosexual women are also oppressed by class, race, and region.

Let us reject as inhumane and destructive to our collective humanity the sexual values and practices of WHM supremacist societies. Let us work together to stop erotically or economically valuing domination, subordination, humiliation, and degradation: those values and practices are unbecoming, repressive, oppressive, and hostile to collectivist liberation.

For too long those with race, ethnic, class, region, and gender privileges and power who are queer have dominated and defined our agendas, our approaches to activism, and our erotic and intimate lives. We must keep at the center of our struggles, those of us with the least access to the most power, especially those who are poor, of color, Third and Fourth World, and female. We must do so with accountability to and in alliance with anti-capitalism/militarism/imperialism/colonialism queer activists; with womanist activists; with radical feminist activists--white, of color, lesbian, and queer; and with Indigenous women activists globally.

image is from here

Jumping Into The Deep End of the Gay Jean Pool: Analysing "Gay Sex in the '70s"

image of this documentary's DVD cover is from here

 "A burst of sexual liberation." That's what it says in the top right, there; see it? It also says "one long sex party." I'd agree with the latter more than the former.

A burst of sexual expression, maybe. A burst of anti-repressive sexual activity, which had its own forms of repression built into it, often unacknowledged because such knowledge doesn't come easy--especially if you're used to be drugged in order to have sex at all. One way gay men deal with their self-hatred for being gay is to obliterate their minds when having sex.

This movie was difficult for me to watch because it reminded me of how much gay men do just to try and have real contact with one another--a high price is paid to feel something beyond pleasure, beyond sensation--and it is the price of knowing who you are and what living in the world as both a privileged and oppressed person, both statused and stigmatised, costs you. And it'll be difficult for me to analyse, but here goes. I'm jumping in the deep end of the denim jean pool.

I remember this era but was too young to participate in it sexually. But some people I knew who were a little older got to experience it, participate, and allegedly enjoy it. And some of them got HIV. One of those people is still alive and well: an ex-boyfriend of mine: we were together when teenagers; he was fifteen and I was sixteen; this was first love for me with a boy and for him too. But love cannot co-exist well with hate, and I hated myself for so many reasons. The story of our love affair is for another time. But years after we were forced to end our relationship by his evil step-father, he ventured into the Big Apple, to take a bite or two. He's someone who is probably genetically lucky, having a body that is more virally resistant than most people. And he does take meds too, but didn't for a long, long time after knowing he was HIV positive. He's healthier than me, probably. And I don't have HIV. But it's not just his genes. It's far more to do with his class and race. Because he didn't have to hate himself also for being poor and of color. He only had to contend with the self-hatred of being gay.

For me, given my age, this is what I think about when I hear about "gay sex in the '70s": I think about HIV/AIDS in the '80s, and what's happened to HIV since then--how it is now, disproportionately, killing so many poor women of color in the U.S. and elsewhere.

But when white guys with some economic privilege want to have fun, fuck everyone else. Literally. "Gay men having lots of sex in the 1970s" are not a discreet, quaranteened group, despite many homophobe's best efforts to accomplish that rounding up. The most vile of the homophobes did and do still argue that AIDS was the gay plague, something visited upon that population by a het white sky-god who hates f*gs. I won't tell them G-d, our Lorde, is a medium- to dark-skinned lesbian. I'm not sure they could handle it.

Gay men in the 1970s included bisexual and bi-curious men in the 1970s, who would visit the many places the video documents in NYC: the West Side

There's another cover, I guess, to the same video/DVD, and this is it:

image of DVD cover is from here

Oh, and one more cover too:

this image of the DVD cover is from here

Now, if you're paying attention you'll notice something about each of those covers. Do you know what it is? That's right: all white men.

Except for one African American man who is interviewed along with a few other men, this is a white man's story. It's not REALLY a white man's story, but only white men tell the story, except for this one Black man. These are the survivors of that era, and one anecdote is kind of chilling about how this comes to be the case. One of the white interviewees tells us of arriving at a party brimming with handsome men in a posh flat, a NYC apartment that seemed, much to his potential delight, like it might turn into an orgy. A real live orgy. As he'd never experienced one, but had experienced just about everything else one could have in NYC in the '70s, he was really excited about what might happen. Except, well, his boyfriend said "We're going. Come on, let's get out of here." He left with his boyfriend, bitterly. And as the story-teller informs us, soberly: four years later only he and his boyfriend were alive, of everyone who attended the party that day. (They knew the men who were there--these were not strangers to one another.)

So, given my age, I think of the '80s aftermath: of Ronald Reagan REFUSING to promote educating people about how to not transmit AIDS, and refusing even to discuss AIDS at all. It's called mass murder by neglect. That's what Ronald Reagan was guilty of. And he was doing it to appease a group he didn't even really agree with: the U.S. "Religious" White Right who he felt beholden to for helping him get elected. "Religious", here in this context, means evil white Christian-identified people who were the Devil incarnate.

But if we back up into the era I didn't really know much about--the one prior to the '70s, we learn a fair amount about the context for why it would be that sex would "explode" onto the scene in NYC. That context was almost unbelievable sexual repression, gross overt hatred, and institutional oppression of gay men. Also of lesbian women, but this movie doesn't concern itself with women--at all. Not even one lesbian. Not even an accidental shot of one lesbian. I think there's one heterosexual woman in the film; heck, maybe she's bi or a lesbian--how the hell do I know. One. Make no mistake--the cover sure doesn't--this is a MAN'S MOVIE, for men, about white men having sex with men of many colors--manly sex with manly men who were very hated and reviled, who'd been beaten or painfully closeted in high school. Who'd been told their sexuality--who they were as sexual beings--was contemptuous, dirty, and evil: and sick, too. Very sick. In need of shocking therapies. Horrid [mis]treatments to "cure" them of this affliction of homosexuality. That this bullshit still exists today in the form of quasi-Christian camps, compounds, and counseling centers to cure gayness makes me sick.

So we already have a few things going on here: the disproportionate class privilege of white gay men due to being white men and not having families to financially support or be responsible for in any number of other ways; the race privilege of having wealthy left to you, and being able to go to various places and not be considered a criminal based on skin tone--no matter how tan that white skin got; the unbridled expression of male supremacist sexuality, unmitigated and unresponsive to feminist/womanist critiques and challenges; and a form of man-worship that Marilyn Frye (in her first book of white radical lesbian feminist philosophical essays, The Politics of Reality) once said should make gay men the patron saints of patriarchy. Or something like that: maybe she said the Cardinal Bishops. Ironically, the Catholic Bishops are, often enough, closeted homosexuals; others are child molesters and nun-rapers. Such a holy bunch, those high-ranking Catholics and other Christians. NOT.

When viewed through just about any lens that isn't white class-privileged gay men's, this story doesn't get told the same way, because it has implications for every other demographic that the white gay story-tellers don't tell us about, at all. They pretend white gay sexual activity that is public and pervasive, not perverse, doesn't spread disease to women, for example. They pretend this. They pretend none of these males are prostitutes. That none of those prostitutes and bi-curious men have sex with other men who have sex regularly with women at home. They get to pretend this. The women at home didn't. The women prostitutes didn't.

From a trans perspective, I am left to wonder about all those males who just didn't look like those guys on the covers of those DVDs. Meaning, really, MOST males. We can add from a man-of-color perspective, because the scene really was VERY dominated--and I DO mean DOMINATED--by white men, some of them in leather, with chains and whips and shackles--pretending this had nothing to do with being white in Amerikkka. But what of those males, myself included, who were into androgyny, who were intersex, intergender, transgender, or asexual? Where did we go? This isn't really answered, except to note there were clubs for us to dance in. But not to have rollicking, robust sex. But one answer is that we were often the prostitutes and street people, kids who ran away from home, often enough, who were being rented and bought and sold to white men with money who wanted to pay for some form of sex, instead of getting sex in abundance for free. We're not mentioned in this movie. AT ALL. The men who are in this movie are all masculinist men; all male supremacist men; all the kinds of men who I didn't find in the least bit attractive because they were so goddamned butch and into being "MEN". The politics, along with the sex, of the day, was that gay men are REAL MEN. And REAL MEN have lots and lots of sex. Het men, bi men, and gay men too.

Which brings me to my next area of analysis: what of this extreme fetishisation and obsession with men-as-objects, as body-parts, as things-to-fuck? What about the rapes that are talked about repeatedly in this film, but NEVER ever once using the word "rape"? Why is that? I knew gay men who had sex with men. And what you learn about having a lot of sex with men is that a percentage of them won't give a shit about you, and will want to use and abuse you and hope you call it as good a time as what he just had--or not: who cares, get out, go away. So much for the love-fest. Woodstock, it wasn't.

Feminist revolution, it wasn't either. And what is not noted in this documentary is that the Women's Movement, with lesbian women often in leadership positions alongside their heterosexual sisters, were embarking on ground-breaking social change efforts, and were succeeding in many regards and many significant radical activists came out of NYC. Meanwhile, down on the docks, in trucks, in the back rooms of clubs, and in bath houses, the gay men were sucking and fucking their brains out. Or so it seems from watching this movie.

We ought to note: it's not that lesbians weren't having sex. They were. But they didn't see their sex lives as sectioned off socially from the rest of their lives. Or, rather, they weren't able to section them off and "have sex over here" and then go to work over there. Or, well, take care of one's parents, siblings, and children. Caring for others is usually women's work, after all. What can be forgotten is that in the 1980s it was lesbian women who weren't HIV positive and ill who took care of lots and lots of very ill gay men. A favor gay men have never repaid to lesbians, btw.

So the questions I have are this:

How do we affirm sexuality without affirming male supremacy and heterosexism? And prostitution? And how do we affirm sexuality without fusing it to capitalism, class privilege, and raced economics? How do we affirm sexuality without making it reflect and re-enact racism: slavery, bondage, chains, whips, buying and selling people?

What of Audre Lorde's essay and speech, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, written and delivered exactly in that place and time--in NYC in the 1970s--and spoken at conferences across the U.S.? What about that as sexual affirmation, and why is it that men, bi and large, won't touch the sexual-political-spiritual-emotional-intellectual content of that essay with a ten foot pole?

I'm asking why understanding and treating ourselves as whole human beings isn't seen as a worthy social justice battle. And I'm asking why it is that white men's ways of being--het or gay--public or private--must rule.

I do think that this apparent "celebration" of male sexuality was tinged a bit with self-hatred. This would explain why rape could happen so frequently, but no one felt able to object. Not objecting to abuse is one of many learned ways of being for oppressed people. I see homophobia at the same time I see gay pride. The two are always fused, for me--one always a response to the other. My objection to some of how Sheila Jeffreys characterises the sex gay men have in her important and insightful book Unpacking Queer Politics--a must read, I'd say, for anyone who is queer--is that she presents gay men as if they aren't an oppressed group of men. And as if oppressed groups don't act out our oppression, our self-hatred, our self-loathing, in various ways.

We must keep in mind that of the population "males and men", the ones who turn out gay are disproportionately vulnerable to childhood sexual abuse, in part because of our longing for connection to males that is physical. Men, usually not gay-identified ones, exploit our need for contact and affection, sexualise it or take it as "consent" if we're sexually interested in men when we're children and teenagers. Adult men can be selfish pricks, and those pricks traumatise lots of children--girls twice as much and twice as often as boys. Father-daughter incest is the most common form of any child sexual abuse. But for the boys and other males who were abused, where do you suppose that rage, hurt, and pain gets acted out? My answer: against ourselves and other gay males, in the course of trying to find pleasure, validation, and esteem.

See also:
http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2010/11/what-does-pro-sex-mean-and-what-can-one.html


http://radicalprofeminist.blogspot.com/2009/12/what-is-gay-sex-pornography-tries-to.html

And please, if interested in knowing how else white gay males can be, see these two films.

The first is titled, Edge of Seventeen. 

image of DVD cover is from here

The second is called  Shelter.

DVD cover image is from here

Both film center their stories on a white gay youth--one stereotypical suburban middle class, the other working class--each of whom come out and figures out what he wants from life and love. I'll give you a clue: it's not repetitious anonymous sex. That's not really a spoiler alert. It's a reminder that these films don't take place in NYC in the 1970s, and that not all gay sex stories are about the thrill of anonymity. But each is also a story of a kind of unchallenged wholesome, non-genocidal goodness about dominant U.S. society that is not honest or true for most of us--especially for those of us who are poor, of color, and women. Capitalism, racism, and misogyny shape what we want out of relationships and who we can have them with. The objects of affection of the central characters in each of these films--spoiler alert--are relatively wealthy white gay men. In a country built on top of the bones and blood of people who had many ways of creating sustainable societies, one ought not assume that wanting one partner in a nuclear family structure is intrinsically "good" and that all other ways of relating and bonding, or doing community, and communication, are "bad".

And, for the record, I'm not politically against any form of sex that is genuinely consensual, including sex between strangers. I feel about sex the way I do about conversation. Sometimes you can sit down on a park bench, strike up a conversation with someone and have it be amazing, and never see them again. And such encounters are rare, and repeatedly seeking out amazement from strangers is often a sign one is avoiding the terror of intimacy, or of knowing too much about who one is and why.

For more on this, please read Andrea Dworkin's chapter in Intercourse on the work of James Baldwin. The chapter is called "Communion". From that chapter, quoting Baldwin in the novel Giovanni's Room, and also the novel Another Country:

[...] David confronts himself, his great failure of courage and love: "I look at my sex, my troubling sex, and wonder how it can be redeemed..."[41]

Shame, like, hate, can kill love; make it dirty; but if one is brave, one will love and that will defeat shame. Shame, unlike hate, can be defeated. One older French homosexual, an exploiter at home in the underground world of gay bars and gay boys, has tried to tell David that he must love, or shame will triumph; the sex "'will be dirty because you will be giving nothing, you will be despising your flesh and his.... You play it safe long enough ... and you'll end up trapped in your own dirty body forever and forever and forever.'"[42] The sex this man has is shameful, he himself says, "'[b]ecause there is is no affection ... and no joy. It's like putting an electric plug in a dead socket. Touch, but no contact. All touch, but no contact and no light.'"[43] And Giovanni, tormented by David's inability to love, wants to escape from his inner life of passion, from the commitment and the involvement and the pain; he wants "'to escape ... je veux m'evader--this dirty world, this dirty body.'"[44] He is anguished because he loves; and using the body in fucking without love, with indifference and mere repetition, would mean escape from pain. For Giovanni, the fucking expresses who he is, has been, can be, what he wants and knows, his passion for David: passion is personal. David cannot love, refuses to be touched (changed, committed).[...]

An inner chastity, an emotional rejection of the tangle of physical love that implicates (and therefore compromises) the whole person--not being touched, not being at risk, not being contaminated by what Giovanni calls "the stink of love"[46]--is a way to avoid the kind of pain that Giovanni is in; and instead of pain, Giovanni too wants the numbness, the ignorance of self, that the coward in love has (however lonely it makes him); Giovanni wants to sleepwalk through life, habitual sex during which, because of which, the insides do not bleed; he wants not to suffer from a consciousness and depth of feeling that permeates his physical existence now, when he does love, his existence inside sex with sex inside him: the way he loves, which is with and through the body and fucking. What he wants but cannot have--because he loves--is perhaps best described by Eric in Another Country:

And the encounter took place, at least, between the two dreamers, neither of whom could wake the other, except for the bitterest and briefest of seconds. Then sleep descended again, the search continued, chaos came again.[47]

But Giovanni never escapes his ability to feel; his identity. Being able to love, rooted in self-knowledge, only makes love possible, not inevitable; not happy; not reciprocal; never safe or certain or easy. [Dworkin, Intercourse, Communion, pages 74 - 76]

Genocidal Atrocities Perpetrated by the U.S. and other Industrialised Nations Against Indigenous People Globally: Two Reports from Bolivia

photograph/portrait of one Guarani family is from Wikipedia, here

An excerpt from the first of who news reports below:

Recent scientific reports show that 300,000 people already die each year from climate change-related disasters. This text threatens to increase the number of deaths annually to one million. This is something we can never accept.

A so-called victory for multilateralism is really a victory for the rich nations who bullied and cajoled other nations into accepting a deal on their terms. The richest nations offered us nothing new in terms of emission reductions or financing, and instead sought at every stage to backtrack on existing commitments, and include every loophole possible to reduce their obligation to act.

Proposals by powerful countries like the US were sacrosanct, while ours were disposable. Compromise was always at the expense of the victims, rather than the culprits of climate change. When Bolivia said we did not agree with the text in the final hours of talks, we were overruled. An accord where only the powerful win is not a negotiation, it is an imposition.

What follows is a cross-post from the Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources website. Please click on the title below to link back and read much more news of import. Two reports on Bolivia appear in this post along with other information about the Guarani People.

Wednesday, 15 December 2010 14:14

Bolivia: Bolivia Decries Adoption Of Copenhagen Accord II Without Consensus

Statement Issued by the Bolivian Government

The Plurinational State of Bolivia believes that the Cancun text is a hollow and false victory that was imposed without consensus, and its cost will be measured in human lives. History will judge harshly.

There is only one way to measure the success of a climate agreement, and that is based on whether or not it will effectively reduce emissions to prevent runaway climate change. This text clearly fails, as it could allow global temperatures to increase by more than 4 degrees, a level disastrous for humanity. Recent scientific reports show that 300,000 people already die each year from climate change-related disasters. This text threatens to increase the number of deaths annually to one million. This is something we can never accept.

Last year, everyone recognized that Copenhagen was a failure both in process and substance. Yet this year, a deliberate campaign to lower expectations and desperation for any agreement has led to one that in substance is little more than Copenhagen II.

A so-called victory for multilateralism is really a victory for the rich nations who bullied and cajoled other nations into accepting a deal on their terms. The richest nations offered us nothing new in terms of emission reductions or financing, and instead sought at every stage to backtrack on existing commitments, and include every loophole possible to reduce their obligation to act.

While developing nations - those that face the worst consequences of climate change - pleaded for ambition, we were instead offered the “realism” of empty gestures. Proposals by powerful countries like the US were sacrosanct, while ours were disposable. Compromise was always at the expense of the victims, rather than the culprits of climate change. When Bolivia said we did not agree with the text in the final hours of talks, we were overruled. An accord where only the powerful win is not a negotiation, it is an imposition.

Bolivia came to Cancun with concrete proposals that we believed would bring hope for the future. These proposals were agreed by 35,000 people in an historic World People’s Conference Cochabamba in April 2010. They seek just solutions to the climate crisis and address its root causes. In the year since Copenhagen, they were integrated into the negotiating text of the parties, and yet the Cancun text systematically excludes these voices. Bolivia cannot be convinced to abandon its principles or those of the peoples we represent. We will continue to struggle alongside affected communities worldwide until climate justice is achieved.

Bolivia has participated in these negotiations in good faith and the hope that we could achieve an effective climate deal. We were prepared to compromise on many things, except the lives of our people. Sadly, that is what the world’s richest nations expect us to do. Countries may try to isolate us for our position, but we come here in representation of the peoples and social movements who want real and effective action to protect the future of humanity and Mother Earth. We feel their support as our guide. History will be the judge of what has happened in Cancun.

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Please click on the title to link back to the source website.

Bolivia: Captive Communities: Situation Of The Guarani Indigenous People And Contemporary Forms of Slavery In The Bolivian Chaco

I. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1. In this report the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (hereinafter "Inter-American Commission" or "IACHR") analyzes the situation of the Guaraní indigenous people in the region known as the Bolivian Chaco, focusing particularly on the situation of Guaraní families subjected to conditions of debt bondage and forced labor. This phenomenon, which affects approximately 600 families, is known by reference to “captive communities,” and it clearly involves contemporary forms of slavery that should be eradicated immediately. In addition, this report analyzes the situation these captive communities face in order to gain access to their ancestral territory.

2. The report was preceded by a working and observation visit conducted June 9-13, 2008, by Commissioner Luz Patricia Mejía Guerrero, in her capacity as Rapporteur for Bolivia, and by Commissioner Víctor E. Abramovich, in his capacity as Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

3. The Commission deplores the existence in Bolivia of practices of bondage and forced labor, which are absolutely prohibited by the American Convention on Human Rights and other international instruments to which Bolivia is a party. The Commission also observes that the situation of bondage and forced labor in which the captive communities live is an extreme manifestation of the discrimination that indigenous peoples have suffered historically and continue suffering in Bolivia.

4. Despite the efforts made by the Bolivian State (hereinafter "the State," "Bolivia," or "the Bolivian State") to address the situation of bondage and forced labor and to facilitate the reconstitution of the Guaraní territory, there are still captive communities whose members are subject to performing forced labor for debts supposedly contracted and who most of the time do not receive any salary for their work.

5. The report concludes with recommendations aimed at cooperating with the Bolivian State in its efforts to eradicate these contemporary forms of slavery and to guarantee and protect the human rights of the Guaraní indigenous people, especially their collective property, their right of access to justice, and their right to a dignified life. The recommendations include actions to: (1) prevent, investigate, and punish contemporary forms of slavery; (2) reconstitute the territory of the Guaraní indigenous people; and (3) guarantee access to justice for the Guaraní indigenous people and all other indigenous peoples in Bolivia.

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See also:
http://www.davidhogsholt.com/html/guarani.html

And note how Wikipedia's introduction to the Guarani People doesn't mention that they are being enslaved and killed by Global Western/Northern most powerful nations like the U.S. Why is that, do you think?

Guaraní ("wuarani") are a group of culturally related indigenous peoples of South America. They are distinguished from the related Tupi by their use of the Guaraní language. The traditional range of the Guaraní people is in what is now Paraguay between the Uruguay River and lower Paraguay River, the Corrientes and Entre Ríos Provinces of Argentina, southern Brazil, and parts of Uruguay and Bolivia.^[1] Although their demographic dominance of the region has been reduced by European colonisation and the commensurate rise of mestizos, there are contemporary Guaraní populations in these areas. Most notably, the Guaraní language, still widely spoken across traditional Guaraní homelands, is one of the two official languages in Paraguay, the other one being Spanish.^[2] The language was once looked down upon by the upper and middle classes, but it is now often regarded with pride and serves as a symbol of national distinctiveness.^{[citation needed]} The Paraguayan population learns Guaraní both informally from social interaction and formally in public schools.